Earlier today, IBM announced that it will acquire SoftLayer for an undisclosed amount after months of speculation that SoftLayer was shopping around for a buyer.

With the acquisition, IBM has formed a new cloud services division headed by Erich Clementi, SVP of IBM global Technology Services. The division will combine SoftLayer technologies with IBM SmartCloud into a global platform that offers a range of choices for IBM and SoftLayer customers, as well as partners.

The acquisition, along with the formation of the new cloud services division, plays a pivotal role in IBM’s enterprise cloud strategy and positions the company as a top player in the cloud computing market.

In an IBM teleconference held this afternoon, Clementi was joined by VP of IBM cloud services Ric Telford, and SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby, where the three senior executives discussed the significance of the acquisition and how SoftLayer’s solutions will fit into the company’s overall cloud strategy.

Clementi:

This investment into SoftLayer comes after years of investments — not just organic investments. I remind you that we invest $6 billion a year just in research and development, but also $4 billion in investments building up more than a hundred SaaS cloud properties. And we’ve done this for several years. The route we have taken is to accomodate for the enterprise side. We follow the priorities our customers have set out for us. If you look at what we’ve done in cloud, we’ve started out private clouds. We’ve started out for managed services for mission-critical environments with SmartCloud enterprises. We’ve followed the need for hybrid cloud deployments and we’ve put our weight behind open standards and capabiltities with OpenStack. And now with SoftLayer, we are able to underpin with a flexibility that is unmatched in the marketplace.

Telford:

SoftLayer will enable IBM to deliver an industry first, which is marrying the security, privacy and reliability of a private cloud with the economy and speed of a public cloud. SoftLayer has a breakthrough capability to provide an easy on-ramp, especially for Fortune 500 companies, to adopt cloud. For the SoftLayer born-on-the-cloud customers, IBM opens it up to the market and to the enterprise for them. The reason we can do this so quickly is that SoftLayer allows customers to select their metal services, in other words, physical, dedicated servers, instead of just virtual servers. And that’s the norm, as you know today, for public clouds. It creates a private environment on customer-dedicated hardware with customizable and network storage, to support public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud, which is really what our enterprise clients are looking for today. Building on a cloud on a dedicated server, a client no longer has to worry about sharing compute services with other companies, which has been a big inhibitor in enterprise cloud computing options today. And it can radically improve privacy, security and overall performance.

Crosby:

In the last several years, we have figured out that this is a very enterprise-grade product. We’ve seen our customer base shift in the last 24 months to a lot of enterprises who have now come to realize the advantages of cloud platform, and have begin to buy indrows. We’ve seen the customer base change dramatically. The partnership with IBM is huge for us. We see this as not only as access to a brand with worldwide recognition, but also an existing customer base and access to data centers and a global network worldwide.